Electronic Health Records

What we're working toward

A record of someone's care should be useful to the next person who cares for them. Too often it is not, because it stops at the edge of the organization that created it. These are the outcomes we are being built to pursue:

• Records that follow a person's care rather than stopping at an organizational boundary.
• Systems that give clinicians more time with the people they serve and less time on data entry.
• A fuller picture of an individual's care, assembled from the places where that care actually happens.
• Approaches that let counties share records with one another where sharing is appropriate and permitted.

Why this matters

Behavioral health care is delivered across county lines, across agencies, and across levels of care. When the information does not travel with the person, the cost lands on the people least able to absorb it: someone retells their history at every door, and a clinician makes decisions with part of the picture missing.

Better-connected information is not an administrative convenience. It is the difference between care that recognizes someone and care that starts over.